Computer automation has proliferated to peoples' houses, with house automation, or home environment management.
One gathers under the name house automation, the whole of electronic technologies, data processing and telecommunication used in the houses.
House automation aims at ensuring the functions of safety, comfort, and monitoring of energy and communications, which one can find in the house.
The various apparatuses of a house are integrated within the home environment management systems which communicate between themselves in order to manage the automation. Some electronic devices make measurements of environment variables, such as temperature, wind speed, and so on. These measurements are used by the home environment management system in order to manage the same or other electronic devices in order to match a user command.
These systems can store one user setting in a user profile and then manage electronic devices for a user that selects this specific profile.
While this technology benefits a user of a specific system, it becomes useless in the situation where the user is traveling, thereby using several different home environment management systems.
Even if attempts have been made to provide a means to carry user profiles for other home environment management systems, a limitation is that a user profile is specific for a home environment management system company or model, and cannot be used for another one.
The following patents illustrate methods and systems for managing measurements in an environment utilizing a portable data processing system.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,604,023 to Brown discloses a method, system and program for managing an environment utilizing a portable data processing system. The portable data processing system can retrieve environmental indicators for a particular environment, and analyze each indicator according to an environment sensitivity profile.
While this technology helps a user to store collected values and helps the user to perform analysis on data collected by specific systems, it becomes useless in those situations where the user is traveling.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,622,115 to Brown discloses a method, system and program for managing a particular environment according to preferences stored on personal storage. This technology introduces the personal storage in the complete environment management system, but it becomes useless when the environment system is preexisting and is limited in the situation where the user is traveling, using several different home environment management systems.
Given the ever-increasing complexity of these ubiquitous environments, and the number of devices and services involved, new standards are arriving to enable this graceful integration. The V2 standard is one of these standards proposed by the technical committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (www.incits.org) which is developing standards for Information Technology Access Interfaces. As part of this endeavor, V2 (www.v2access.org) is about to issue the Universal Remote Console (URC) architecture. The international standard for a Universal Remote Console (URC) is based on AIAP-URC (Alternative Interface Access Protocol—Universal Remote Console) which is a standard interconnection protocol that allows users to control mass-market devices/services (termed “targets”).
In view of the foregoing, it appears desirable to offer a method, system and program product to automatically manage a set of normalized settings to be transferred to a home environment management system using a Universal Remote Console. The present invention offers such a solution.